DGE is now available online

Play for free in your browser - https://screentop.gg/@DrMindermast/DGE

Get it on Tabletop Simulator - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2875684618

DGE prototype and first playtests

I've never built a physical prototype before, but I spent most of Friday evening printing and cutting out cards, and I'm pretty happy with the outcome:

 

Yesterday and this afternoon I tested it out with two different groups - 3 players the first time, 4 players the second time (with a fifth joining in mid-game).  More fun the second time around, probably because of the larger group and definitely because that group got more into the improv/roleplaying aspect of the game (i.e. spinning wild b.s. explanations for why alcoholic armor will make you a better fighter, or a thundering accordion will help you win the gods' favor).

What I've learned so far is that the core of the game is easy to pick up and works as intended, but the scoring is too fiddly in a way that doesn't match the tone of the game.  Mentally juggling "preferred material" and "malfunction material" was more work than I expected.  I'm not 100% sure yet what I'm going to do about this, but right now I'm thinking maybe to drop "preferred" and just have the random "malfunction" penalty.  If I go more extreme, which is a possibility, I might get rid of scoring altogether, just have players hold onto the cards they won like in similar games, and give materials a different effect like maybe drawing different numbers of cards for the next round (whether you keep them all or choose one and return the rest is still up in the air).  Current rule is that you only have 3 Base and 3 Mods, which is definitely constraining when you're trying to figure out how to make that fit a specific request that probably has nothing to do with your items, but that's also where the bs-ing comes in.  And that's clearly the strong point of the game.  Time for more pondering, and hopefully a better iteration by the time I finish making virtual copies.
 

Looks like it's time to kill my darlings

 Had a Grand Expedition playtest yesterday with the fine folks at Break My Game.  First impression was good, people liked the theme and the overall idea of the game, but the same problem reared its head about things moving too slowly (which then trickles down to some other problems that reduce the fun).  We talked about ways I can improve this, and it looks like what it's going to take is some major changes to some core elements of gameplay.  Today I started thinking through what that might look like while still at least keeping the basic foundation.  The main thing is the board layout.  The way the game has been so far, there's a large blank map with one corner that's filled in at the start, it's divided into "zones" based on how far they are from home base, terrain is randomly determined as players explore (weighted to produce larger areas of the same terrain instead of being 100% random from one space to the next), and players pay a variable movement cost for each hex depending on the type of terrain.  The playtesters liked the weighted randomness of the terrain, but not the variable move cost, or having little information with which to make meaningful decisions as they explored, or the way that more distant zones made some adversaries more difficult but didn't actually feel cooler, or the hassle of spending several turns just walking back to town when you're injured while in bad terrain that's halfway across the board.  And while I know that no one person's opinion should be taken as gospel, the things they pointed out were things that I had worried about before too, though never articulated quite as well.  So with that confirmed, here's the new system that exists in my mind but not yet on paper:

Instead of being one big hex grid, the board is now divided into several adjacent sections, each one 5 hexes in diameter; the game term "Zone" now refers to these different sections.  Each Zone is randomly assigned to a specific terrain type, and while terrain is still random, it's now weighted based on the Zone it's in rather than wherever the player is coming from (so if you specifically want to explore some mountains, you know that you'll have the best odds in the Zone that has a mountain in the center hex).  Exploration cards, rather than being in one deck with different cards limited to different terrain, will now be split into separate decks for each terrain type (based on the Zone rather than the individual tile - maybe dwarves usually live in hills or mountains, but if you happen to get a swamp tile in the middle of a mountain Zone then there could still be dwarves there).  Movement cost will be flat, based on number of hexes regardless of terrain (maybe variable depending on whether or not you are exploring any new territory this turn).  To make terrain still matter, each terrain type will have a different bonus effect if you walk through that hex without finding anything there.  And to fit this with my original concern about not wanting the board to get too crowded, I'm thinking that each turn spent exploring will still only yield one Exploration card, regardless of how many hexes you've explored that turn - you draw a card, find whatever you find, choose which hex it belongs to, and then get the bonus effects for the other "empty" hexes.

Assuming I stick with this, it means a lot of work rewriting the Exploration cards, as well as a lot of the magic items and player abilities, so that everything makes sense under the new system.  I also don't know if Legends will even still be a thing or not.  So I think the first step from here is to figure out how to do just enough of the work for a "proof of concept" test, see how I like it, and go from there.  No idea how long this is going to take, but I do feel confident that I'm going to have a much better game whenever I finally do come out the other side.

EDIT: Thinking about it some more, I realized that I might end up changing the victory condition too.  With Zones now being clusters of similar terrain and their own individual Exploration decks, I could say that each Zone has a "Legendary" something or other (still working on a name that is sufficiently flexible and not lame), which would be an Exploration card with some extras on it to make it feel especially cool, and then instead of competing for Fame points the players could instead be competing to collect a target number of Legendary cards.  I'm not sure yet how I feel about this, although one thing that occurs to me is that it will probably feel like less of a slog compared to the current experience of "after three turns I have collected this much Fame, I still need this much more to win the game."  Less swingy too, since I've seen how it can go that someone who has one or two turns where they get lucky with the cards can build up a huge lead on the scoreboard.  Still going to need to put a lot of thought into this, and probably test the board setup change with and without this other change.

DGE rule sheet complete

 Last week I told you about Dwarven Guild of Engineers, and now I've got the first draft of the rules complete and available for reading.  Note that that's just the rules, not the cards.  Next thing I need to do is refresh myself on how to use Nandeck and then actually make four decks worth of cards, and then I can get everything up on Screentop and TTS.  At least I do know what's going in them to begin with (and it should be easy enough to add more if I come up with them).

New game: Dwarven Guild of Engineers

 I needed something to occupy my brain while I was mowing the lawn this morning, and what I wound up was figuring out the first-draft version of the scoring system or one of the games I mentioned back in this post.  And with that, it's now developed enough that I can talk about the game in some detail.  So, because I don't have enough other projects to juggle, I will now present to you The Dwarven Guild of Engineers.

DGE is a card-matching game sort of like Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity, but with a little more meat on the bones.  Each round, a "Patron" card is drawn with a request, such as "make my mines more efficient" or "help me to travel underwater."  Each player has a hand with a mix of "Base" cards (such as "helmet," "drill," or "flagon") and "Modification" cards (such as "flaming," "photosynthetic," or "with extra cushioning"), and plays one card of each type to make an invention.  Once everyone has played their cards, all players vote on which invention best fits the patron's request, with the limit that no player may vote for their own invention.  So the invention to help with mining might be a Flaming Drill, or maybe a Steam-Powered Hammer, or a Backpack With Extra Cushioning (though that last one might need the player to explain their reasoning a bit).

Now here's where it gets a little more fiddly.  These dwarves can invent all kinds of things, but that doesn't say anything about how well they actually work.  To represent this without getting heavy on character stats or anything, each Patron, Base, and Modification card will have a color on it.  If either of the cards you play matches the patron's color, you get bonus points, even if you didn't win the vote (although winning the vote is still worth more points, even without matching colors).  If both cards have the desired color the bonus increases.  However, after voting the group must also roll the Malfunction Die, which will pick a color that gives penalties if it's on either of your cards (again, bigger penalty if both cards have it).  If the patron and malfunction colors match, then there is no bonus for patron color and the malfunction penalty gets even worse.  Continue until you feel like ending the game, and whoever has the most points wins.

One last wrinkle that I've thought up for this game is "Goblin" cards.  This is a resource each player has to mess with the other players and/or the scoring system while everyone is still working on their inventions.  I haven't come up with too many of these yet, but the kinds of effects I'm thinking of are things like "force another player to trade one card with you" or "reroll the Malfunction die."

Current status - I've got the basic outline you see here, ideas for about 50 Base cards, 35 Modifications, and 15 Patrons, and a handful of Goblins.  I don't know what my target numbers are but I definitely want more cards for each deck, and I need to settle on specifics of how many cards you get and when you draw new ones (seems obvious enough for Base and Mod, but for Goblins I'm really not sure yet).

Grand Expedition now on Screentop - 100% free

What the title says - for those who don't prefer Tabletop Simulator, The Grand Expedition is now available on Screentop.gg.  If you want to try out the game without downloading anything and without paying for the platform, now's your chance.  Although you'll have to grab the manual off of Scribd.

Magic items for Neon Knights

 I'm still around, I promise!  Just busy with other things the past few weeks, rather than game stuff.

In theory I'm supposed to have been working on getting The Grand Expedition ported over to Screentop.gg, but that's going very slowly while I learn their system.  So today I focused instead on Neon Knights, which I haven't touched in a little bit.  Had a pretty good day of it too.  I was specifically focusing on the chapter which would be "magic items" in a traditional fantasy game.  Instead, for NK it's "technomagic," i.e. things that look like '80s sci-fi or cyberpunk but work through a combination of magic and lost technology.  These are all lost treasures of a golden age that ended long before the NK time period, and which cannot be recreated at present.

The biggest category, which is what I wrote up today, is cartridges.  Yes, like in your old video game console, but a different size so you can plug it into the hilt of your sword if you want to.  An item has to have a port for you to plug the cartridge into, but if it does, then the cartridge gives it magical bonuses.  And the same cartridge can be plugged into different kinds of items, with the bonus changing depending on the specific item, but keeping with the theme represented by its title.

Earthdawn has a cool system where significant magic items have "key knowledges," bits of significant information about the item (e.g. who created it, what epic battle it was used in, etc), and if a PC learns one of these facts and invests some xp into it they unlock new powers for that item, or upgrade existing powers.  I'm doing the same thing here with cartridges.  I haven't thought of a good in-game term for it yet ("key knowledge" doesn't feel right, and "unlock" sounds too much like modern software rather than 1980s), but the idea is still there.  And it's not just learning facts either - that might be part of it, but you also have to do some sort of action which affects the magic inside the cartridge.  Here's the example that I wrote for the rulebook:

A cartridge called "Lightning Arc" would initially let you spend a fate point to invoke the Lightning Arc Aspect.  Some possible upgrades, and their requirements, include:

• Three free invokes per day - this requires the cartridge (and the item it is plugged into) to be left in the branches of the iron tree at the peak of Demon’s Worry Mountain
• Another Aspect, called Blinding Flash - this requires the user to speak a particular incantation while holding the cartridge up toward the sun at its highest point
• Once per day, the ability to teleport instantly to any spot the user can see, up to a hundred yards away - this requires the cartridge to be plugged into a specific machine that was used by its creator in the Before times, and which might still be found in the ruins of their factory

So, just like in Earthdawn, upgrading your magic items isn't just a matter of leveling up or spending enough gold, it can be serious adventure fodder itself.

That's where I am for now.  I still need to write something about other technomagic items, and I've got a few ideas for that, but I think that what's left will be less than half of the chapter overall.